Mr. Lew may have reneged on a commitment he made last year to make a woman the face of the $10 bill, opting instead to keep Alexander Hamilton, to the delight of a fan base swollen with enthusiasm over a Broadway rap musical based on the life of the first Treasury secretary.

But the broader remaking of the nation’s paper currency,
which President Obama welcomed on Wednesday, may well have captured a
historical moment for a multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial
nation moving contentiously through the early years of a new century.

Tubman,
an African-American and a Union spy during the Civil War, would bump
Jackson — a white man known as much for his persecution of Native
Americans as for his war heroics and advocacy for the common man — to
the back of the $20, in some reduced image along with the White House.
Tubman would be the first woman so honored on paper currency since
Martha Washington’s portrait briefly graced the $1 silver certificate in
the late 19th century.

While
Hamilton would remain on the $10, and Abraham Lincoln on the $5, images
of women would be added to the back of both — in keeping with Mr. Lew’s
intent “to bring to life” the national monuments depicted there.

The
picture of the Treasury building on the back of the $10 bill would be
replaced with a depiction of a 1913 march in support of women’s right to
vote that ended at the building, along with portraits of five suffrage
leaders: Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice
Paul and Susan B. Anthony, who in more recent years was on an unpopular
$1 coin until minting ceased.